So there's a zombie apocalypse, the zombies are everything people usually imagine zombies to be, but it turned out that they each retain one skill they had in life. There's evidence that a victim can choose what to keep by focussing really hard on it after being bit.Well guess what? You were bit. By a zombie, but by your little sister. Well she bit you too, but it's the zombie that count more. Stupid little sister. Anyway, you're going to turn, and you don't have a way to off yourself to avoid becoming a zombie.The kept ability can be as complex as speech, but zombies really don't have much to say, you'd just talk about zombie business: "Hey, you look delicious, let me eat you please!" While more polite, it isn't very useful or original. You could keep two complementary skills, but you'd be clumsy at both. You could sing very well, or dance very well, but if you want both you'll do both awfully.

So. What do you keep? Do you want something that would make you less dangerous or even useful to survivors? Or would you rather be more deadly? I mean, if you're going to be a zombie, might as well be good at it! Or would you prefer to be amusing? Or to leave a last mark on the world?

This is easy. I'd like to keep my sneaky business of stealing other people's pants. I'll have to train myself to resist temptation when hungry, though, so I can show off my cool clothes to everyone and get the satisfying feeling of a brilliant theft. Those pantsless zombies will be SO jealous. It would make an amusing apocalypse movie.

I'm sort of torn on this one. One the one hand I think I'd like to retain problem solving skills. So when tasty brain transporters barricade themselves in buildings I can find ways in that don't result in me with a bullet my head. On the other hand I'm huge fan of irony. So retaining some completely unzombie like skill would be amusing. I'm not a vegetarian, but that would be an ironic trait to retain for someone who is. Juggling maybe?

So retaining some completely unzombie like skill would be amusing. I'm not a vegetarian, but that would be an ironic trait to retain for someone who is.

How about cooking? It would involve plenty of vegetables (just cutting and grilling a piece of meat isn't cooking; it takes other ingredients), actually hoard much of the food survivors would need more.And since meat would likely be involved, you would be a zombie that carves it out of a victim instead of biting, then prepare it tastefully. Before eating anything, you fill the air with delicious cooking smells, and every human around try to stop salivating over what they know to be human flesh. Then you catch your next victim as it tries to steal your food.

I'd try to off myself, or seek a skill that would make me unlikely to continue wandering around and spreading the disease.

More interestingly, however, would be zombies who retained skills to increase their effectiveness. One skill I can imagine being useful here is fashion sense and the ability to apply makeup. Not only would such zombies be tough to pick out, they'd also be tough to kill, particularly early on when normals haven't become emotionally hardened to the necessity of killing bipeds. A related skillset would center around the ability to solicit aid; infected beggars would be difficult to distinguish from normals.

In a different direction, animal handling would be quite good if animals didn't have an instinctive aversion to the undead; a zombie + dogs combination would be extremely difficult to deal with. Lastly there weapon use, which, horrifically, would be a skill many zombies might develop by sheer accident late in an epidemic.